WORKING ON TOMORROW’S BREAKTHROUGHS TODAY

For a hospital, one of the many great benefits of being part of a world-class academic health system—which The Miriam is, through its Lifespan affiliation and partnership with The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown

University—is that you get to both participate in and lead cutting-edge medical research and clinical studies today that result in the health care breakthroughs of tomorrow.

Such is the case at The Center for Behavioral and Preventive Medicine at The Miriam. Over the course of its 30-year history, the center has conducted research in fields as diverse as cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease to smoking cessation, exercise, and neuroscience.

Today, its focus includes, but is not limited to, the effects of psychological stress and trauma on disease; the patient experience of COVID-19 “long haulers”; women’s health and pregnancy; smoking cessation and e-cigarette use; qualitative methods, and the role alternative interventions— like yoga, mindfulness, and tai chi—can have on the prevention and/or management of various diseases.

“Our research scientists and their teams focus on the role human behavior plays in health and disease, and they work to discover new and improved approaches to prevention, diagnosis, and treatment,” explains Laura Stroud, PhD, director and senior research scientist at the center. “Together, we seek to integrate the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences through clinical, community, and laboratory-based research.”

Although new to her current role—she was named director in November 2020—Dr. Stroud is not new to the center. After completing her undergraduate work in human biology at Stanford and her graduate studies in clinical health psychology at Yale, Dr. Stroud’s postdoctoral studies brought her to Brown University and soon after the center, in 1998. “I didn’t have a plan to stay in Providence when I arrived,” she admits, reflecting back, “but I fell in love with the city and the research community here.”

Moving forward, Dr. Stroud says her plan is to capitalize on the center’s core strengths to build new collaborations and research areas, recruit new faculty, and to expand the center’s overall capabilities. Goals, she points out, that are being helped along by the power of philanthropy.

“The Miriam’s donor family has been very supportive of our center’s work and we are deeply appreciative of their generosity,” she says. “They understand that when you support research, you are helping to shape the future of medicine.”